The critical period

Editorial from Philippine Daily Inquirer

http://opinion.inquirer.net/inquireropinion/editorial/view/20100129-250030/The-critical-period

THE COMMISSION ON ELECTIONS and its supplier Smartmatic ran “field tests” in several sites across the country on Wednesday, and Comelec Chair Jose Melo pronounced the experiment a success. But three and a half months before the May 10 polls, public anxiety over the country’s first nationwide and fully automated elections continues to persist.

Public sentiment is solidly behind the automation initiative, which promises to eliminate many opportunities for election fraud and to determine the winning presidential candidate in a matter of days. But several delays in the Comelec’s original schedule have stoked public anxiety, and fueled calls for a timely return to manual elections.

A question raised more than once during Wednesday’s joint congressional oversight committee hearing thus deserves to be asked again: When is the Comelec’s critical period? That is to say, where is the point of no return? What is the election agency’s real deadline for deciding whether to hold full or partial manual elections?

At the oversight committee hearing on Wednesday, Melo said it was all systems go for automation. “I’m very confident that we will be able to automate because almost all the precinct count optical scan machines are already here. The batteries are already here and so are the laptops and marking tests. Everything, except for the balance of the PCOS machines,” Melo told reporters.

Melo’s optimism was based in part on new estimates from Smartmatic that the last of the optical scanners—the backbone of the automated election system—will be delivered to the Comelec a week before the deadline of Feb. 28.

But as Sen. Chiz Escudero, a known skeptic of the current automation law, pointed out the same day, the delivery deadlines had already been previously readjusted, to compensate for certain contract-related delays. Question: If a still-substantial “balance” of the 82,800 PCOS machines required under the contract remains undelivered after Feb. 28, will the Comelec readjust the delivery schedule again?

Melo answered a similar question from Albay Rep. Edcel Lagman in this wise: “In that event, there will be areas in the country that will have no PCOS machines and the elections there will be conducted manually.”

Indeed, the Comelec is readying a contingency plan that assumes that as much as 30 percent of the country’s voting precincts will resort to manual elections. The question, then, is: Which precincts are last on the delivery schedule (and therefore have the first opportunity to return to manual elections)? The Comelec must schedule the deliveries prudently, even defensively, because if notoriously fraud-prone areas (such as those towns and provinces identified in the “Hello, Garci” wiretaps) are at the end of the list, then the public is right to anticipate skullduggery-in-the-making.

The reassurance Comelec’s chief lawyer, Ferdinand Rafanan, offered the committee is well-taken. Parañaque Rep. Roilo Golez had aired his concern (one shared by many, we are sure) that the 30-percent threshold seemed too high, and vulnerable to manipulation by political operators. “It’s not really because we foresee that there will be manual counting in 30 percent [of the clustered precincts],” Rafanan said. “That is not acceptance on our part, that’s preparation.”

Granted. But this takes us back to the question of “critical period.” What is the decision point for converting preparation into acceptance? In other words, when will the Comelec decide that a particular cluster of precincts, or a particular locality, must resort to the manual vote?

Most important: The field tests the Comelec and Smartmatic conducted on Wednesday were largely successful—and yet the various test sites reported widely varying transmission times, and even technicians reported some minor glitches. Most worrying, the Comelec had not received the results from the two test precincts in Lake Sebu, South Cotabato by 3 p.m., or a few hours after the test started.

The inevitable, time-related, question: What is the acceptable window for transmission of results? This is not a simple question but a serious one, precisely because of our sordid history of election fraud. An hour’s delay can prove to be critical indeed.